Your Brand Is Training Data
Lauryn Warnick on positioning B2B brands for a market where AI builds the shortlist before a human shows up.
For twenty years, repositioning a B2B brand was about the room. Get the story sharp enough that your best rep could walk into a pitch and carry it home. The human was the delivery mechanism.
The human isn’t always in the room anymore.
Your buyer opens ChatGPT, types “best [category] for [problem],” and reads back a shortlist before anyone at your company knows they exist. The model doesn’t repeat your sales deck. It repeats whatever shows up most consistently about you and your category — written by anyone, everywhere. Which means brand language stopped being decoration. It became the thing that decides whether you get found or cut.
Lauryn Warnick has spent two decades on that problem — first inside the brand industry’s top tier, Wolff Olins, Lippincott, and Landor, then in the operator’s seat running marketing at Chartbeat, now as founder of Villain Branding.
She writes and hosts The Brand Equation, a newsletter and podcast where senior brand leaders talk about what brand actually does for the business. Her working line: average is the most expensive thing you can buy.
We sent her our questions. Her answers are below, lightly edited.
You’ve repositioned enterprise B2B companies through their highest-stakes moments for two decades. What broke in the last 18 months that wasn’t broken before — and how is this failure mode different from the cyclical repositioning you’ve always done?
We used to talk about “the room.” Get your story sharp enough that your best rep or exec can walk into a pitch and carry it home. The rep was the delivery mechanism. The human. But we all know the human in the room isn’t always the thing anymore. We’re building for the (ever-changing, totally black box, hard to understand-let-alone-influence) model.
Your buyer opens ChatGPT or Perplexity, types “best [your category] for [their problem],” and reads back a shortlist before a single human at your company knows they exist. And the model doesn’t repeat what your rep is saying aloud. It repeats whatever language shows up most and most consistently about your brand and your category.
So if your story only lives in the sales deck and it’s wildly inconsistent across everything else and/or you sound exactly like everyone else in your category, you’re invisible. You’re not getting found, let alone let into that room.
Bain and Google have research on the “day-one list” (the vendors a buyer already has in mind before they do any real digging). 86% of buyers have that kind of list, and 92% end up buying off it. That list used to form from reputation and word of mouth, but not anymore. It forms from whatever the bots read about you.
So I’m seeing the old failure mode as getting beat in the room. Now you’re getting cut before the room even exists. It’s rough out there...
Your method positions a brand against an enemy — a competitor, an incumbent, a lazy assumption. In the AI era, what’s the most common wrong villain you see B2B companies pick, and why does it leave them looking identical to everyone who picked the same one?
So many people are picking the same villain right now. They’re all against what they define as “legacy.”
Every B2B company with an AI story decides the enemy is the old, slow, manual way of doing things. That isn’t great. You don’t want to be that. I agree with that premise. But until you realize the forty companies you compete with all picked the identical enemy, you’re not going to stop sounding like the same press release.
Every single SaaS org is writing something like “ditch the legacy approach” or “move faster with [insert their AI thing they think is novel].” That makes you no longer a unique brand. It makes you all the same category.
What we try to get our clients to see is that a real villain is specific enough that your competitor literally couldn’t put it on their own homepage. Salesforce went after software itself. Remember that little red NO SOFTWARE circle they used? Their competitors couldn’t steal that, because their competitors were software. Liquid Death went after boring water and plastic bottles. Find those edges and you stand out to LLMs as much as to the people you’re selling to.
A lot of times CEOs of tech companies will say “but we do it better” and so they want to claim the same positioning. That may be true, but you’re NEVER going to get to the point of proving what “better” means to a customer if they can’t find you. And in the AEO world we’re in, they won’t find you if you sound just like them... better or not.
You say mid-size B2B teams are stuck between “product speak” and “buzzword soup.” What does each actually sound like in a sales deck — and what does the working third option look like?
I could talk about this for hours (maybe that’s a sad thing to admit!).
Product speak is like if your feature list or Jira tasks or changelog got thrown on your homepage. You see things like “Configurable workflows, role-based permissions, real-time sync.” All true! I’m sure all great! But they tell me nothing about what changes for the human reading it. It’s a parts list cosplaying as messaging (or worse, positioning). This is happening A TON with AI right now. I’ll die on the hill that AI is a capability. It’s not your positioning. It’s not even a category. It’s a way of working. Like “Digital” was back in 2007.
Buzzword soup is the overcorrection on trying to sound clever and disguise those product points. “The intelligent platform for modern teams.” So vague it floats way too high for anyone to actually use it. Can you throw your competitor’s logo above the headline and have it still be true? That’s where buzzword soup comes in.
So product speak = too low to matter. Buzzword soup = too high to differentiate (or land at all).
The version that works, I’ve found, lives at the altitude of the buyer’s actual day. It says the specific thing that’s hard for them, and/or what they get to stop doing. And it says it all in the words they already use (that’s key) about their own job.
“Your team stops rebuilding the same report every Monday morning” beats, well, pretty much any sentence with the word “orchestrate” in it.
Stripe nailed this. Their whole pitch was “a few lines of code and you’re taking payments today,” aimed dead at every developer who’d survived a six-month, sales-gated, call-us-for-a-quote integration nightmare. Drop it in over coffee, you’re live. A developer reads that and knows exactly the relief that’s coming.
Usability is hugely important, too. It needs to work on your site, but your sales rep also needs to say it out loud without cringing and cursing their marketing team. Most importantly, your buyer can repeat it to their boss without a translator. Some people use the “cocktail party” or “elevator” story. I think it’s more “can a tired VP retell it in a hallway without cue cards?”
Your promise is a story that travels across teams and decisions without breaking. Where does a fragile story break first in an enterprise B2B company, and what does the symptom look like for a CMO who doesn’t yet know that’s the root cause?
Sales enablement. Every time.
It’s actually a big reason why we’re often brought in. What happens is the story makes it through launch just fine. Leadership signed off, the website’s gorgeous, everybody clapped at the all-hands. Lots of kumbaya moments. Then it gets properly stress tested by the people who have to say it out loud forty times a week. Once it’s not making their lives easier because it’s “too clever” or “too complicated” or “not specific enough” or whatever the reason is, they ignore it. They build their own decks. They re-explain the company from scratch on every call. Then the sales cycle gets longer. Cross-sells and upsells get harder (because the story’s more complicated than it needs to be).
The biggest challenge is that no one actually agrees on the problem.
The CMO sees “we have great messaging but reps aren’t using it” and thinks it’s a training problem. In some cases, it very well could be. They just need to make it more usable. But MORE isn’t usually the thing they need. It’s less, but sharper. So more enablement. More decks. More Gong reviews. None of that solves the problem. It’s that the story was built for consensus and approval. Nobody built it to survive actual deal conversations. Those are two completely different jobs. One rewards nuance and caveats, the other rewards a sentence you can say drunk (or tired!) at a conference.
Avis figured that out in 1962: “We’re number two. We try harder.” Hertz couldn’t touch it. That’s a story built to be repeated.
Your sellers are closing deals in spite of your brand. They’ve each duct-taped together their own pitch, and they’ll keep using it until the official story is easier to say than the one they invented.
A CMO making the case for repositioning has to sell it to a CEO and CFO. What’s the most defensible way to put a dollar figure on misalignment?
I’ve found you have to put a number on the bleeding the mess is already causing, pulled from the data the CFO already trusts.
Three numbers that move in the wrong direction when there isn’t brand consistency.
Sales cycle length stretches because every deal starts from scratch — the buyer re-learns who you are at every stage.
Win rate against your number-one competitor drops because the second you leave the Zoom, the buying committee has to retell your story to each other, and if they can’t, they default to the competitor whose story they can repeat.
Ramp time for a new hire drags because there’s no clean story to hand them, so month one is them inventing their own or unlearning and relearning four different stories. This is actually a big reason why CMOs call us. They come into the organization and after a month they say “I’m STILL trying to figure out what we do and why. We need to get to clarity quickly.”
Now the ask changes shape. You walk into the CFO’s office holding a leak in the funnel they already watch every Monday. The brand refresh is a cost, yes — but they’ll fund it once they see it’s being paid back by the shorter sales cycle.
That’s the key to shifting mindsets from brand-as-expense to brand-as-revenue-driver. Simply: don’t lead with brand.
You put CMOs and CEOs in the same room. Where do they most often disagree about brand work during an AI-era repositioning — and what’s the disagreement actually about underneath?
The CMO wants to move the story forward, the CEO wants to protect what’s already there. Especially if that CEO is the founder, of course, or even if they came up through engineering or product.
What it takes them a little bit to see is that they’re actually both scared of the same thing: losing something. The CEO has watched the current positioning build pipeline for years and hears “reposition” as “set fire to the thing that’s working.” You and I know that the first rule of branding is “do no harm,” but the CEO doesn’t know that. They think they’re losing everything they’ve worked for. It’s scary!
The CMO is closer to the market and can feel the story going stale, getting vanilla, blending into the background. What she’s losing is distinctiveness, the thing that made buyers pick you on sight. She can see the day it’s gone for good getting closer and closer. That’s scary too!
They’re both just doing their job. It’s about whether you can change the words without torching the equity you’ve banked in the old ones. And the answer, of course, is... of course you can. You should! The equity and the exact language aren’t welded together. You shift perception by taking short cognitive steps forward for the buyer.
So most of my job in that room is boring. I make them say out loud what they’re keeping before anyone’s allowed to argue about what changes. And we always start with what we recommend they keep and build on before talking about what may need to change. Most of the fear evaporates right there.
You frame brand as a revenue tool, not an aesthetic exercise. At enterprise scale, how do you actually prove the positioning work moved the business and not just the marketing metrics?
I won’t talk to you about attribution. And we of course do full brand tracking studies prior to and after a launch. I’ll also say, we (and a lot of people smarter than me) are constantly working on a better way to measure brand value without adding more dashboard theatre to our clients’ fatigue.
The simplest way is that we baseline four things up front: sales cycle, win rate against the named competitor, average deal size, and what percent of deals used the actual company story versus a rogue version. Then I watch those again after we launch with the new story.
Impressions and share of voice don’t prove a thing here. Instead we look at the usual aided and unaided awareness, consideration, etc., but also at how many people stop building custom decks, how deals move faster, how often you start winning the head-to-heads you used to lose.
Gartner says buyers spend only about 17% of the whole buying journey with sales (and that’s all vendors combined).
So the brand is doing the selling when nobody’s in the room.
If the only needle that moved is brand awareness, cool, but I just ran a marketing project. The bar for us is whether selling the thing actually got easier.
You’ve said you have “a habit of talking people out of giving you work.” When does a CMO not actually need a repositioning, even when they think they do — and what’s the cheaper, less glamorous fix you point them toward instead?
More often than you’d think — and I’ll talk them out of it, which my CFO hates. This is one of those things that the founder of an indie agency can do that most of my former employers can’t.
What I usually see is that the brand book or the positioning language is actually really strong. It’s just sitting in a PDF nobody opens. Reposition that company and you’ve handed them a shiny new document to ignore. Now they’ve got two really smart, totally unusable things. It’s irresponsible, honestly.
The better fix is way less glamorous. Take the story they already have and make it impossible to avoid for marketing, sales, product, HR, CX, and execs. That means doing the tough but crucial operations and systems work. Things like building the sales deck so the official narrative is the path of least resistance and the rep actually uses it. Or baking it into onboarding so new hires learn it before they pick up bad habits. We’ll even script things like earnings calls or keynotes so the exact words everyone else is seeing are written into what the CEO says publicly.
Honestly, sometimes this is way harder to do. We have a few folks on our team who do nothing but the operations and enablement work (much different from execution marketing) and are held to metrics of usability and cross-team penetration. Again, it’s not always sexy, but it makes the measurable and monetizable difference.
And since I’m the founder of the company, I have a lot to lose. Frankly, I’d rather lose the revenue than sell someone a cure for a disease they don’t have and have the word get out that I did. There are too many agencies like that. I have no interest in it.
What’s the most important shift in B2B brand work happening right now that senior marketing leaders should be paying attention to — but that nobody in their LinkedIn feed is writing about yet?
It’s funny you frame it as “not writing on LinkedIn,” because I’ve absolutely written about this and it’s gotten such little engagement, but I stand by it!
What’s so important to know is that your brand is training data right now.
Every model your buyers ask for a recommendation is learning your category from whatever’s most repeated about it online. And right now? That language is being written by your competitors, the analysts, and some guy on Reddit. You’re letting other people teach the machine what your category means, then acting surprised when the machine doesn’t recommend you.
Still, in the second half of 2026, so many CMOs think about AI as the thing they bought to write blog posts faster or create cool semi-on-brand images for LinkedIn carousels. Meanwhile it’s now become where the shortlist gets built, before a human is anywhere near it. AI is a capability, not a category. Same goes for how you use it on brand: the real work is making sure the machine repeats you correctly.
Lauryn Warnick is the founder and CEO of Villain Branding, a verbal-first brand strategy agency that works with enterprise B2B tech companies through their highest-stakes moments — post-acquisition repositioning, category launches, and the runway before a raise. She writes and hosts The Brand Equation. Her working line: average is the most expensive thing you can buy.
This wasn’t a paid post. We interviewed Lauryn because she had something worth saying. We’re always looking for collaborations, case studies, and sharp marketers with insights to share. If that’s you — a leader with a good story — just hit reply. We’ll sort out the rest together.
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